1 Dedicated texture based tools for characterisation of old books

This paper lies on the field of ancient patrimonial books valorization: it precisely relates to the development of suitable assistance tools for humanists and historians to help them to retrieve information in great corpus of digitized documents. This paper presents a part of this ambitious project and deals with the presentation of a pixel classification method for ancient typewritten documents. The presented approach lies on a multiresolution maps construction and analysis. For 5 resolutions we construct 5 different characterisation maps. All the maps are based on texture information (correlation of pixels orientations, grey level pixel density…). After the merging of these 25 maps, each pixel of the original image is described by a vector which allows the computing of a hierarchical classification. In order to avoid issues linked to the binarization process, all or maps are computed on grey level images. The system has been tested on a CESR database of ancient printed books of the Renaissance. The classification results are evaluated through several visual classification illustrations